At a previous employer we had a pool table which was well used by almost every level of the company. People would regularly disappear for 20 minutes to play a couple of games.
On a whole I think it was probably neutral or even a positive for productivity. If my project manager wanted to talk through something he'd usually appear over my shoulder and just say "pool?". Similarly other people on the team when struggling with something would do the same and use the time to loosely discuss the issue (often in rubber duck fashion) or just take a few minutes to think about something else which was often enough to get things moving again.
Shit, man, foosball ain't no joke, I can't talk while doing that!
We used to have a table at Oracle, inherited from the SUN acquisition. Managers never used it, maybe because they were mostly women. We had some furious tournaments though, where I discovered that French people play it with balls made of cork - for a slower and more technical game.
Ah yeah, I probably should have mentioned that almost the entirety of the conversations would happend while waiting to be next in line for a game, or post match.
There is little to no coherent speech that happens during those intense 5-8 minutes
I really didn't think anyone would have difficulty understanding what was meant here...
Ofcourse the lunch break was ours to do with as we pleased. That wasn't the point.
Rather the point was that no one ever raised any issue with a group of the professional developers playing video games inside the office. And sometimes for longer times than just lunch.
That does speak to the type of people who were managers there. They realized that this was a close group of friends who were honing social and coordination skills that would feed back positively into the team's work.
I advice leaving the snarky tone at the door next time.
It can usually only backfire on you.
On a whole I think it was probably neutral or even a positive for productivity. If my project manager wanted to talk through something he'd usually appear over my shoulder and just say "pool?". Similarly other people on the team when struggling with something would do the same and use the time to loosely discuss the issue (often in rubber duck fashion) or just take a few minutes to think about something else which was often enough to get things moving again.